Expo, ongoing

Efficiency Vermont’s “Better Building by Design” conference and expo continues Thursday at the Sheraton Hotel and Conference Center in South Burlington. • At 8 a.m., keynote speaker Eric Corey Freed will elaborate on global trends in building efficiency, in keeping with the conference’s theme of “Net Zero by 2030.” The public is welcome to attend. • More information about the conference can be found at Efficiency Vermont’s website: http://bit.ly/BBD2014, or by contacting Kelly Lucci at klucci@veic.org.

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Old Man Winter drives the point home: A huge portion of Vermonters live and work in buildings that leak heat.

Fitting then, that Efficiency Vermont holds its annual Better Buildings by Design conference and expo when the mercury’s in the basement.

On Wednesday, the nonprofit issued a numerical goal — zero, to be exact — to the hundreds of builders, designers and architects who flocked to the Sheraton Hotel and Conference Center in South Burlington.

The goal has nothing to do with no-growth. It signifies the amount of energy a building needs to import over the course of a year: zip.

By 2030, all new buildings in Vermont should be built to the net-zero standard, according to the state’s comprehensive energy plan.

No one in the workshops or the exhibition hall was complaining about yet another deadline. To the contrary, most of them seemed fired up.

Who could blame them? They were surrounded by a new generation of tools for the job, and a crowd (some wearing suits; others in suited up for messy jobs), raring to put them to use.

The net-zero goal, Merriam said, matched the downward trajectory of the energy Vermonters require to get on with their lives.

It makes good business sense, he continued: The cost of reducing electrical loads, for instance, is roughly half of what it costs to generate and transport electricity. Shrinking a building’s appetite for power also allows for smaller, cheaper installations of renewable energy, such as solar panels, Merriam said.

The formula works for low-income Vermonters, too, he noted.

Gut-remodels and vents

At a standing-room-only workshop on retrofitting homes, a tough audience quizzed the presenters on materials, cost comparisons and technical specifications.

There had been, and will probably continue to be, blind spots in the quest for net zero, the builders acknowledged.

To the uninitiated, much of the discussion veered toward Greek.

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Some of the builders’ frustrations translated more easily. One structure began as “the gut-remodel of a dump,” according to presenter Paul Sipple, who documented its rescue.

Chris Stackhouse, a Montpelier-based builder, transformed a Middlebury home — a Prairie School “low-rider” — into one with a roof that actually sheds snow and water, and now keeps heat loss to a minimum.

Within the home’s walls, Stackhouse’s crew encountered “dozens and dozens of bizarre conflicts,” most of which were resolved.

If the neighbors harbored any objections to the degradation of a minor landmark, Stackhouse added, they declined to vent.

Both men agreed that purity of vision and top-shelf building materials mattered less to their projects than a willingness to remain flexible in the face of customers’ budget and time constraints.

Both projects relied (with varying degrees of success) on scrounged or “salvaged” hardware.

New gear, old gear

Downstairs, in the exhibit hall, the gear positively gleamed.

Displays of high-efficiency LED lighting — seemingly more plentiful than previous years — warmed to new spectra, sparkled with space-age fixtures.

Triple-paned windows, popular in Canada, likewise seemed to have gained ground.

At one of several displays of cellulose insulation, Belchertown, Mass.-based vendor Chris White explained the old-school fiber’s appeal.

Unlike higher-tech spray-foam, cellulose is “hygroscopic,” that is, it wicks stray household moisture to dryer areas of a building, where it can evaporate, White said.

Creating insulation from recycled newsprint, shipped from no more than 350 miles to be processed, yields a low “embodied energy” (energy used to manufacture and/or transport a substance) — unlike products made from fossil fuels, he added.

Facing it

Around the corner, what looked at first glance like a bisected motorcycle engine turned out to be a late-model, Danish-made water pump.